Fiction Review: "America America"

Ethan Canin's title makes clear the scope of this novel: the nation itself, written, in this case, through the travails of politics, personal ambition, power, money, wealth and class. Even for an almost 500-page book, that's a lot to grapple with. Perhaps, in fact, too much, at least for "America America."

In 1971, teenager Corey Sifter is chosen by the powerful Metarey family to be their groundskeeper and eventual boy Friday. The family is the patron of a stretch of then semi-rural New York state, inheriting their wealth from patriarch Eoghan Metarey, a Scottish immigrant whose ambition was matched by his ruthlessness and eventual success. Liam and June Metarey have two daughters, Clara and Christian, and a son, Andrew, in Vietnam for much of the novel. Sifter is a union man's son; he understands little of what he sees and maybe even less of what he does.

That same year, Sen. Henry Bonwiller, a family associate, decides to run for president; Liam becomes a major adviser to this campaign. Easy campaigns don't make for good stories, though, and the book is heavy with foreshadowing from the first page. There is a scandal, Bonwiller falls, and the echoes reverberate through all the families involved for decades to come.

Sifter narrates the book from his perch in 2006, when he has become a newspaper publisher and a father of three. The story is mostly chronological, though eventually Canin skips in time, apparently to play coy with the details of Bonwiller's fall. The coyness feels forced, but the political threads of the book are never as interesting as the familial ones, the interactions among the Sifter family and their neighbor, Mr. McGowar, or between Sifter and this strange breed, the rich.

There are, unsurprisingly, echoes of American history, both real and fictional, throughout the book, from Sen. Ted Kennedy's 1969 Chappaquiddick incident to the constant, doomed striving of Jay Gatsby. Liam Metarey himself believes that the intersection of American history, especially presidential elections, will carry Bonwiller to the White House. He's wrong, of course, maybe because he chose the wrong history to look at; lust, greed and avarice are historical fact, too. Everything in the story means something, like a wall in a Victorian house, crammed with paintings and pictures across every inch.

The weight of all that history and intended significance, unfortunately, crushes some of the life out of the narrative. All the symbolism and foreshadowing and self-conscious meaning and circularity (Sifter is himself a benefactor to a young intern at his paper, helping her in much the same way Liam Metarey helped him) make the story itself feel heavy-handed at times. That's a shame, because when it works, the story reveals its characters to us in delicate layers of understanding, from the obduracy of problem-child Clara to Liam Metarey's own overwhelming, consuming loyalty.

Nor does it help that the novel sprawls on too long -- ironic, given that the narrator is a newspaper man. One lesson, alas, that the book doesn't intend: the grace of brevity.

Details:AMERICA AMERICA
Ethan Canin, Random House
$27, 480 pages

Reading:Canin reads from "America America"
at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Powell's City of Books,
1005 W. Burnside St.